Article history: Received 5 April 2015 Received in revised form 30 May 2015 Accepted 2 June 2015 Available online 9 June 2015 Communicated by D.-Z. Du

Competition, despite its potential drawbacks, is an easily adopted and frequently used motivator in classrooms. Individual abilities, in the years of schooling, are inevitably different, and performance in competition is heavily ability dependent, resulting that more-able students always win while less-able students always lose. Students easily perceive how well they perform through the result ...

We prove a lower bound ρ ≥ 9.001 for the competitive ratio of the so-called online matching problem on a line. As a consequence, the online matching problem is revealed to be strictly more difficult than the “cow problem”.

This paper modified the mechanism of weight adjusting of the Self-Organizing Mapping network (SOM) for solving the problems of topology preserving and clarifying boundary of clustering graph for the clustering analysis. The modified SOM is named the Multiple Clustering Centers SOM (MCC-SOM). The MCC-SOM changed the competitive learning mechanism of “winner takes all” to allow the more one clust...

A significant challenge that faces any teacher of introductory programming is the diversity of the class. At one extreme there will be students who have never programmed before, while at the other there will be students who have many years experience of programming. Handling this diversity is difficult. The temptation for the instructor is often to focus on the novice group and to assume that t...

A problem perplexing many ecologists studying natural communities has been how the species of a community coexist without competitive exclusion occurring. Hutchinson named this the 'Paradox of the Plankton', though the question has been asked especially for tropical rain forest and coral reef communities. Twelve mechanisms have been proposed to explain the paradox: 1. Niche Diversification, 7. ...

More than 90 capsular serotypes of Streptococcus pneumoniae coexist despite competing for nasopharyngeal carriage and a gradient in fitness. The underlying mechanisms for this are poorly understood and make assessment of the likely population impact of vaccination challenging. We use an individual-based simulation model to generalize widely used deterministic models for pneumococcal competition...

Effects of anger induction procedures such as frustration and harassment on cardiovascular reactivity have been demonstrated in a wide range of experimental situations. Similarly, heightened cardiovascular reactivity has been associated with a diverse range of tasks involving active coping, competition and interpersonal interaction. The present study sought to directly compare the relative effe...

Most people approach the issue of competitiveness by attempting to define what it is or what it should be. However, it is also interesting to approach the matter from a different angle by examining what factors are not essential in establishing a country’s competitiveness on world markets. While certain factors are certainly helpful for promoting competitiveness, they nonetheless should not be ...